Letter to my sister about Doll's 4 R's

Abstract

This article applies William Doll's postmodern perspective on curriculum to the education of the author's 4-year-old niece. It is written as a letter to the child's mother (the author's sister) and thus offers an interpretation of the applicability of Doll's theory to education in the People's Republic of China. The article begins by introducing some key concepts in theorizing a postmodernist curriculum and draws attention to the differences between a modernist curriculum and a postmodernist curriculum. The article then examines Doll's 4R's (richness, recursion, relations, and rigor), with particular reference to their implications for Chinese education, and their patterns (in ambiguity, webbing and play) when understood as a whole. The article concludes with the author's reflections on how postmodernist curriculum theorizing has influenced her personal worldview.